Travis Griggs wrote: > I do not like the python lambda. For two reasons. > > One: In a language that sought to be approachable by simple people (i.e. > non computer science graduates who would use it in addition to their > scientific/education background), I can’t believe they threw in a 6 > character phonetic description of a greek character to imply “fragment of > code expression to be executed in a removed context”. Show a subset of > keyword.kwlist to a non-comp-sci guy and tell me if when they see the > ‘lambda’ betwixt the others, they don’t stop and think “huh, one of these > is not like the others”.
Ha :-) The reason lambda is called lambda is that a Lisp fan added it, way back in the early days of Python, and Guido didn't notice until it was added. In functional programming circles, lambda comes from the lambda calculus, a branch of pure mathematics. But I'm not concerned about the name "lambda". It's no more jargon than "closure", "coroutine", "continuation", "class" [hmmm, what's with all the C words?] or "comprehension". And besides, now as an English speaker, you get to feel the tiniest glimpse of what it is like to be a non-English speaking programmer forced to use these mysterious keywords `if`, `return`, `while`, `raise` and similar. > Personally, I don’t think the desire to use lines as statement boundaries > (something I like a lot) and at the same time to tersely pack multiple > statements into a deferred code fragment, are reconcilable. And I don’t > think there’s critical mass desire for them. So this subject will continue > to resurface regularly. Agreed! -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
